Interview, Vanessa Benelli Mosell on Debussy

An impressive 2017 recording of the First Book of Préludes notwithstanding, Debussy may not necessarily be the first composer who comes to mind in connection with Vanessa Benelli Mosell. The Italian pianist (and latterly conductor) is perhaps best known for her association with the late Karlheinz Stockhausen and her work with contemporary composers - though as I discovered when I had the pleasure of meeting her via video-call in October to discuss her new recording of Book II of the Préludes, she feels that Debussy's impact on late-twentieth and twenty-first-century music can scarcely be overestimated...

Ahead of Vanessa's recent performance at the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe in London, we spoke about her relationship with Debussy's music and his influence on subsequent generations of composers, her intuitive approach to programming, the process of coming to terms with the more 'abstract art' of conducting alongside a parallel career as an instrumentalist, and her continuing enthusiasm for working with living composers...

You recorded the First Book of Préludes back in 2017, alongside the Suite bergamasque– how do the technical and musical challenges of Book II compare?

In a way all of the Préludes in Book II have a counterpart in Book I: they have a similar order and similar inspirations, but to me the Second Book is much more complex, especially in harmonic terms. It shows Debussy at a completely different stage of maturity, and I think it’s pretty tough for the audience to listen to the whole set in one go. I even found that with the First Book, when I was touring with it in 2018: I’m so used to contemporary repertoire that to me it seems almost like Romantic music, but to some audiences it still sounds very modern. The Second Book will be even tougher for people, but I like challenges - and I like playing for people who like challenges!

Over the past few years I’ve come to think that Debussy is really the father of contemporary music, not Schoenberg as I used to believe. His music influenced everything, from the New Romantic composers to the avant-garde music of today – it’s a language that’s travelled a very long way.

How do you like to programme the Préludes in your recitals: with other works by Debussy, or alongside more recent music?

It’s kind of intuitive: I always feel that there’s a line you can trace through my programmes, but I don’t consciously plan anything with that in mind. All of my repertoire is somehow connected – I don’t do Bach or any of the other baroque composers, for instance – so if I combine things together I know they will always work. I try to focus not only on the composer’s story (which is already familiar to most people who go to recitals anyway) but on the story of my own personal relationship with their music, because that’s a story that only I can tell.

And how long ago did your own relationship with Debussy begin?

Oh, a very long time ago: I think I was maybe eight or nine when I played my first Debussy pieces. I started with some of the Préludes from the First Book, the Suite bergamasque and the Deux Arabesques, which are still part of my repertoire today.

At the very beginning I really liked the Michelangeli and Pollini recordings of the Préludes, but I found that once I started to dig deeply into Debussy for myself I began to find them somehow foreign to my idea of the music, and I didn’t like them quite as much as before! My own interpretation is what I like the most, and I don’t say that out of narcissism: it’s just logical that one’s own performance will reflect how you personally want to hear the music.

Certainly I couldn’t listen to other musicians playing these pieces when I was about to record them myself, because a recording is inevitably always a compromise, even without taking other people’s ideas on board. A studio recording is a wonderful opportunity to set down what you really want to say at that particular moment - but a recording is also for ever, and so you have to balance that spontaneity with the awareness that your vision of the music could be quite different in a year’s time…

Does this group of pieces present any particular challenges in the studio as opposed to in live performance?

I recorded all of the Préludes in one day, which gave us the whole second day to spend on L’isle Joyeux and Children’s Corner: actually recording these pieces doesn’t take so long, but finding the right sound can take a whole lifetime! So on one level I’d been warming myself up for years…My main priority for the recording was to find the right connection with both the piano and the hall, and once that clicked into place I was able to do the whole thing in more or less one take.

I’d played the piano we used for the recording on one occasion in concert, and felt it would work well for this project: like many of the really exceptional Steinways it’s named after a great painter (Titian, I think) rather than having a number, and there’s something very special about both the sound and the feeling of the keys under the hand.

Several pianists we’ve spoken to over the past eighteen months have mentioned finding particular solace in the music of Debussy (and Chopin) during lockdown – was that also the case for you?

I recorded my Casta diva album quite near the beginning of the first lockdown, in spring 2020, then of course I didn’t have many opportunities to play the programme live because of the restrictions. Then during the second and third lockdowns I started to focus on Debussy, because I’d had this project in the diary for four years; my schedule is always planned so far in advance that even with everything shut down I still didn’t have much breathing-space to explore repertoire outside what was coming up. I resumed playing concerts once things opened up a little, including the Clara Schumann concerto, the Beethoven concertos and the Chopin concertos in the version with strings, so there was plenty to focus on!

You’d also begun to move sideways into conducting before lockdown hit – is that something you’ll continue to explore now that larger-scale concerts are happening again?

Yes, hopefully! I’ve been conducting for four years now, and I’ve had so much advice and suggestions from my conductor friends – notably Mikko Franck, with whom I was already in touch before I started conducting. Various people I’d worked with over the years suggested I give it a try because they thought that my personality and musicality would be well suited to conducting; obviously that was more or less on hold during the lockdowns, but now I’m back and I have lots of plans including some orchestral tours…

I know that lots of instrumentalists take up the baton, but I’m really committed to doing this to the absolute best of my abilities: there are so many talented conductors out there who are focusing on this one thing, and I don’t think it’s right that an instrumentalist who’s already famous gets booked for concerts without really knowing how to conduct properly. The profession deserves a lot of respect, because it’s such an abstract art: if you’re not a conductor yourself, I think it’s impossible to judge another conductor. Certainly I wasn’t able to do that when I wasn’t conducting, but since I started I have a much clearer picture of what constitutes good (nor not so good!) conducting.

It’s essentially the exact opposite of playing an instrument, and it involves rethinking your entire musicality. That requires a lot of time and practice - not only with an orchestra, but also working alone on gesture, studying scores and instrumentation, deepening your knowledge of each individual instrument and how they work. I’m not interested in just becoming an instrumentalist who directs from the keyboard, because to my mind that’s just for the audience: orchestras these days can play pretty much anything up to and including Brahms without a conductor, provided they have a strong concert-master. A conductor is ultimately not there to make things more complicated, but to make things more musical.

Alongside your upcoming conducting engagements, do you have any plans to work with more contemporary composers as a soloist?

Yes, lots! The only thing I can talk about right now is Olga Neuwirth’s piano concerto Locus … doublure … solus, which I’ll be playing with the Orchestre National de Lyon on 26th March, and I’m really excited about that – the orchestra approached me and asked if there was a particular concerto I wanted to explore, and I immediately seized the opportunity to programme this one. (It also exists in a version for piano and ensemble, but we’ll be doing the version with full orchestra). I love working with living composers, and I’m so looking forward to getting to know Olga, whom I’ve never met before.